Empathetic Improvement on Showing Work in Math

Showing work is a part of math that students are just expected to do. For my problem of practice I am spending some time looking at middle school students’ work and helping to shape it into a more worthwhile task for students. Every week students have an assignment where they need to submit a screenshot or pictures of the work they have shown every week. Although they get credit for submitting anything I spent some time analyzing the work that students turned in. Overall about 25% of my students submitted anything however  only 5% of my students actually submitted scratch work. This raised quite a few red flags. 

Although I am finding a low success rate the only way to make a change is by first looking at why. I had a brief conversation with students as well as giving them a survey as a way to anonymously express their thoughts. When I did this a few themes emerged:

1. Students believe they are showing work (about 54%)

2. Students only knew how to show work sometimes

3. Students do not know how to get their thoughts from their heads to paper

4. Showing work can help with understanding, remembering, and checking student’s work

5. Showing work is an extra assignment when the teacher says it is necessary

6. Students are afraid of doing the work wrong and making mistakes

The student comments gave me a great deal of insight. I was able to learn that students not showing work is not a deliberate choice but is resulting from fear, lack of understanding, and confusion. I also learned that students are struggling to see the why behind showing work. While talking with students they expressed that just showing their work from the week was too broad and would rather have specific areas and models for what their work should look like. Without this insight I would have seen it more from laziness or defiance but there is so much more behind what is going on. In order to improve my success rate with having students submit work I need to make steps to address these concerns. 

While the students gave me a lot of great data on the roadblocks this is only a launching point. This helped me to see some areas where I can focus my efforts and make the most gains: 

1. Explicitly model how to show work and give exemplar examples

2. Model how to write out different thinking processes or strategies

3. Narrow in the focus for where and which problems students need to turn their work in for

4. Provide students with an understanding of why to show work and when it is beneficial including how to spot mistakes

Using what I have learned was helpful in identifying my focus areas as ultimately showing work in math should benefit the students but if they do not have the knowledge to do this then more instruction needs to occur. This starting point will be a great place to reflect on as I start building solutions to my problem of practice on students showing work. 

Table showing the percentages of students who submitted scratch work assignments over 2 weeks.

Student Survey Results